The N.Y.P.D.’s Guide to Newark’s Muslims

There is a lot of good the New York Police Department can be doing—has done—to keep the city safe from terrorist attacks. But is producing what the A.P. describes as a sixty-page “guide to Newark’s Muslims” really, or even remotely, in that category? The A.P. has also reported on the N.Y.P.D.’s dubious explorations of Muslim student groups at Yale, Rutgers, Columbia, several SUNY campuses, and a half dozen other colleges. (I wrote about the N.Y.P.D., and the larger question of America and Islam, over at Daily Comment, where I can be found on Wednesdays. And the A.P. has collected its invaluable work on one page.)

“The report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior,” according to the A.P. What it did include was this:

For months in mid-2007, plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims…. Police also photographed and mapped 16 mosques, listing them as “Islamic Religious Institutions.”…

“Come, look at yourself on film,” Abdul Kareem Abdullah called to his wife as he flipped through the NYPD files at the lunch counter of their restaurant, Hamidah’s Cafe.

It would be wrong to frame the objections to this sort of profiling simply in terms of security vs. civil liberties. Treating a whole category of people with generalized suspicion is no way to get to know your neighbors; the road to safety does not lie through a community that has been alienated. The supposed goal of what the N.Y.P.D. called its “demographics” program was to get to know the lay of the human landscape better; that doesn’t seem to have been the result. Here’s more from Abdullah, the café owner:

An American-born citizen who converted to Islam decades ago, Abdullah said he understands why, after the 9/11 terror attacks, people are afraid of Muslims. But he said he wishes the police would stop by, say hello, meet him and his customers and get to know them. The documents show police have no interest in that, he said.

“They just want to keep tabs on us,” he said. “If they really wanted to understand, they’d come talk to us.”…

Ironically, because officers conducted the operation covertly, the reports contain mistakes that could have been easily corrected had the officers talked to store owners or imams. If police ever had to rely on the database during an unfolding terrorism emergency as they had planned, those errors would have hindered their efforts.

New Yorkers don’t need to be shy, even, or especially, in Newark, and we don’t need this kind of counterproductive surreptitiousness from the police force. That leads to another question: Did the N.Y.P.D. think that this would help New Yorkers understand New Jersey? Are the suburbs the real foreign country, or is the city the enduring mystery?

Photograph by Henny Ray Abrams/AP Photo.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.